LIANA Remote Tool (MCP Server)

Serves LIANA (Dimitrov et al., Nature Communications 2022) — the consensus cell-cell communication framework that re-implements CellPhoneDB / CellChat / NATMI / Connectome / SingleCellSignalR over shared curated ligand-receptor resources — as a ToolUniverse remote tool: run_liana_cellphonedb (top ligand-receptor interactions between cell types via the CellPhoneDB method).

Served remotely (not bundled) because liana pulls in scanpy + anndata + scikit-learn and the bundled ligand-receptor resources.

Deploy

pip install -r requirements.txt          # liana + scanpy
python liana_tool.py                       # starts the MCP server on 127.0.0.1:8017

Inputs are referenced by adata_path (a server-accessible .h5ad of log1p-normalized expression with a cell-type label column in obs), since single-cell matrices are large. Expose remotely only behind TOOLUNIVERSE_API_TOKEN (SMCP bind guard).

Register in ToolUniverse

Tool definition: src/tooluniverse/data/remote_tools/liana_tools.json (type: RemoteTool). Connect via the standard MCPAutoLoaderTool/server_url mechanism.